Slovakia's prime minister

Lonely tigress

Slovakia’s brainy prime minister is isolated at home and abroad

LAST July few people mourned when Slovakia's government, a mixture of leftists, populists and nationalists led by Robert Fico as prime minister, was ousted. Many welcomed its centre-right successor—especially an Oxford-educated sociology professor named Iveta Radicova, who took Mr Fico's place. Yet six months on, her grip is weakening and her popularity has fallen.

Her strongest suit is her determination to put an end to sleaze. Ms Radicova proudly wears shoes that she bought for €9 ($10) while campaigning in the country's hard-up east. Her austerity goes down well with jaded voters tired of cronyism and extravagance. She has put all public procurement contracts online. That is a contrast with the cosy ways of the Fico era—and with the lumbering efforts to clean up state purchasing in the neighbouring Czech Republic.

She cares about the rule of law. She has sacked three colleagues of Stefan Harabin, the chief judge, who is said to be soft on corruption. One replacement is a campaigner for judicial openness. She proclaims fiscal responsibility and wants to restore Slovakia's reputation as “Europe's tiger”.

The trouble is that her political skills may not match her vision. She is not even boss of her party, the SDKU. That job is held by Mikulas Dzurinda, a formidable former prime minister who now serves as foreign minister. Her partners in the four-party coalition are prickly. The bickering culminated in a late autumn squabble about the attorney-general's job. Amid farcical scenes (parliamentary deputies being made to vote in pairs or photograph each other's ballots), Ms Radicova threatened to resign. Few seemed particularly bothered. The choice of a new attorney-general has now been put off.

Nor has she shown much flair in foreign affairs. She earned the wrath of her fellow euro-zone leaders with a priggish refusal to contribute to the Greek bail-out. Ms Radicova says she is irked by the condoning of extravagant “social mortgages” in countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. But some say the government's purist free-market principles come not from Ms Radicova but from the finance minister, Ivan Miklos, the brainy mastermind of Slovakia's pro-market reforms of ten years ago.

Either way, Slovakia may find it has few friends in Brussels when it comes to tricky European Union budget negotiations later this year. Already the east Europeans are meeting a flinty response from the EU's paymasters.

Ms Radicova likes to quote her old Oxford tutor, the late Ralf Dahrendorf, who said that sociology was “critical awareness of the state of the society”. But she has found that defining problems is easier than solving them.